TALLAHASSEE — The call to Skip Simmons, CEO of a mentorship program in Volusia County, came from out of the blue.
One evening in December of 2022, he said, someone from the governor’s office phoned and told him to show up in Ormond Beach the next day for a roundtable discussion about family services. Expect a surprise, he was told.
The secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families was at that next-day meeting, explaining her vision for the agency, when “all these Tahoes rolled into the parking lot,” Simmons said. Flanked by security, Casey DeSantis walked in.
The First Lady announced she had an early Christmas present for the five nonprofits at the meeting, handed out oversized $10,000 checks and then posed for photos with nonprofits’ officers, including Simmons. It was, he said, “a massive boost to our organization.”
But Simmons had not requested the money. He did not make a commitment as to how his organization would spend it. And his charity, No Longer Fatherless, has no direct connection to the work of Hope Florida, the highly-touted DeSantis administration anti-welfare effort that became embroiled in controversy this spring.
As welcome as it was, the payment to Simmons’ charity and others like it illustrate recurring issues with the initiative overseen by Casey DeSantis and once viewed as a vehicle for her own gubernatorial campaign: Its charitable giving seems haphazard, its guidelines for providing help unclear and its record-keeping incomplete, posing a potential issue with state and federal auditors.
“Hope Florida should do a much better job articulating how they spend that money. That’s a real problem,” said Will Brown, director of the Center for Nonprofits and Philanthropy at Texas A&M University. “You’ve got to be able to document how a charity’s funds are going to charitable purposes.”
Two files obtained by the Orlando Sentinel through public records requests —documenting donations made by Hope Florida over the three-year span of its charitable giving — show the initiative donated to well-heeled charities and to small local groups, with no obvious thread linking the favored groups.
Rachel Arazashvili, the founder and CEO of Kidds Are First, which provides clothing and school supplies for foster children, said she had no idea how Hope Florida chose her or the other five Volusia County nonprofits that received the $10,000 grants in 2022.
“They probably contacted someone in Volusia County for the names of some local organizations,” Arazashvili said.
Other contributions, many of which supported worthy causes, also lacked obvious connection to Hope Florida’s mission.
One nonprofit president who got Hope Florida money said he used it to take two kids on a “once in a lifetime” fishing trip to the Keys.
A list of Hope Florida Foundation spending for 2024 includes payments to a Panhandle golf resort, a half-dozen churches in the Naples area, six families identified by name, a handyman, an air conditioning contractor, two cabinet makers, a furniture store and a gas utility.
When an Orlando Sentinel reporter started contacting some of the Hope Florida recipients in an effort to determine how and why they were selected for the benefit, the Florida Department of Children and Families reacted swiftly. Within two days it sent a threatening, unsigned “cease and desist” letter claiming the families that received money were foster parents — a group whose names are supposed to be kept in confidence, although the foundation’s attorney had revealed them — and demanding the Sentinel stop its reporting.
The DCF demand letter said the Hope Florida Foundation, meant to aid DCF in its work, had raised money from companies that wanted to contribute to hurricane relief, then “gifted” home repair work to foster families after Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit. A representative of one of the home repair companies confirmed to the Sentinel that sequence of events.
But it remains a mystery why the department threatened the Sentinel in an effort to keep secret its work of assisting foster parents with hurricane-damaged homes.
“They should be talking about this as an accomplishment,” Brown said.
A bigger controversy
The Florida House investigation that fueled this spring’s Hope Florida controversy – revealing its nonprofit foundation had been used as a clandestine conduit for $10 million in campaign expenditures — also showed the foundation was late filing its tax returns, failed to have an audit performed and did not provide an annual budget to DCF as required.
But those revelations don’t speak to the specific work of the foundation – what money it raises and how it spends the money to support its declared mission of using private individuals and organizations to help wean Floridians off government aid. The Sentinel obtained records in hopes of illuminating that.
The records span two distinct periods of Hope Florida’s existence. One lists 85 grants, totaling nearly $1.3 million dollars in donations given to local charities. That was prior to mid-2023 when a nonprofit organization overseen by the Florida Department of Education collected and distributed money at Hope Florida’s behest.
A second document, in the form of a spreadsheet, lists 198 expenditures totaling $550,000 since the state created a separate Hope Florida Foundation in August 2023. Most of those expenditures, which begin in January 2024, were not charitable donations but instead bonuses for state workers, bills for a golf tournament fundraiser and other foundation expenses.
During the period covered by the spreadsheet, the foundation raised $2 million, meaning it had $1.5 million that it had not distributed (the earlier document does not list contributions to Hope Florida). The foundation did not respond to emails asking about the intended use of the remaining money. The funds were raised from more than 200 individuals and corporations, many of which do business with the state and have contributed to Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican Party.
Hope Florida was set up by the Legislature to support DCF, the state agency that provides child protective services and other aid to needy Floridians, and its Foundation is supposed to raise money to help fill the gaps in DCF’s services.
Oddly, the spreadsheet does not include the controversial $10 million political donation or its subsequent disbursement in the form of two unsolicited $5 million grants. Those happened in October — a period covered by the spreadsheet.
Neither document explains why the people and charities listed got assistance. The foundation, DCF and the Florida Department of Education have not responded to numerous requests for records that might shed more light on the purpose of Hope Florida’s giving.
But in an email, Sydney Booker, a spokesperson for the education department, said the earlier grants were made to organizations that provided housing assistance, mentorship, food, clothing, bicycles and beds.
“We are focused on harnessing any available assistance to support the success of Florida’s children,” Booker said.
Puzzling patterns of spending
This is not the first time the Sentinel came across puzzling expenditures in its ongoing look at the Hope Florida Foundation.
There was the $588 paid in March to a Lakeland single mother, Ginger Faulk, after she taped a video testimony praising Hope Florida. Faulk also received $392 from the foundation the previous year.
A spokesman for DeSantis said the payments were for travel reimbursements but provided no further details. The timing of last year’s payment coincides with a Hope Florida golf tournament fundraiser, which The Tampa Bay Times reported Faulk attended.
Then there was $95,500 paid to the St. Joe Resort that turned out to cover the lodging, food and other expenses, including custom golf clubs, racked up by DeSantis staffers attending that golf tournament fundraiser last May.
The two documents list expenditures that raise even more questions.
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The “once in a lifetime” fishing trip for two kids to the Florida Keys was fueled by a $10,000 donation to a nonprofit from Lakeland called Take a Kid Fishing, nonprofit founder William Dunn said. He refused to answer any further questions about the grant and hung up.
The organization’s website says its mission is to help “underprivileged and fatherless kids through mentoring and fishing excursions” where they teach the kids “life skills and responsibilities.”
Among the first nonprofits to receive checks from the First Lady were two Orlando nonprofits — Sleep in Heavenly Peace and Commission 127, Inc., a religious organization that provides support to families in crisis. They each received $20,000 for donating bunk beds to needy families.
The Hope Florida Foundation’s bylaws state that all disbursements must have a written request identifying the payee and the reason for the disbursement. The foundation and DCF have not responded to a request for those records.
Joshua Hay, the foundation’s president, admitted during a legislative hearing in April that most grants and expenditures were made by DCF, though he couldn’t name a specific person in the state agency.
“I would get calls from a DCF representative or liaison that there was a grant to be paid out,” Hay told legislators. He’d receive a memo describing that decision, review it, sign it and send it back.
There were “lapses in reporting procedures,” he said, and the foundation had no staff to ensure all financial matters were handled properly.
One of those deficiencies, Hay said, was the lack of an standards for deciding who deserves money from the foundation.
“There are some things we can do to strengthen our procedures around monitoring what the funds are used for,” Hay said, though he provided no specifics.
Charities must have clear procedures for advertising grant opportunities, determining eligibility, vetting recipients, and making sure that funds are used for legitimate purposes and avoid conflicts of interest, like grants being steered to people connected to board members, said Laurie Styron, CEO of CharityWatch.
“Grant decisions shouldn’t be made based on the whims or pet causes of a charity’s staff or board members. This is public money. It must be used for the public good,” Styron said.
Public or private?
Hope Florida’s early grants were distributed with lots of fanfare, and often a news release, which prompted local media coverage, said Rep. Debra Tendrich, a Lake Worth Democrat who has run her own nonprofit for ten years.
That stands in stark contrast to the silence around the $10 million the foundation received last September as part of a Medicaid settlement agreement. That money was then distributed without notice to two nonprofits, which got $5 million each, and then to a DeSantis-controlled committee working to defeat the effort to legalize marijuana.
“That is the biggest red flag to me,” Tendrich said. “How is it you can give out $5,000 checks and hold a press conference, but a $5 million grant you want to keep it private?”
Hope Florida’s more recent expenses were also made quietly, and without fanfare.
The foundation gave $10,000 each to Trailways Camp, a Fort Myers camp for adults with special needs; Baby Basics of Naples, which provides free diapers to needy families, the Pregnancy Care Center of Lake City, and the Mount Sinai Medical Center Foundation in Miami Beach.
Another $178,500 was paid to more than 150 state employees who worked on Hope Florida initiatives, most of whom got $1,000 bonuses.
Charities must documents that payments to vendors and other expenses benefit the charity and “were not made for the private benefit of an employee, board member or some other interested party,” said Styron of Charity Watch.
Hope Florida reported on its tax return that it had no document retention policy, which would raise flags for an auditor who would ask to see proof about those expenses.
“It wouldn’t pass an audit,” she said.
Perhaps the foundation’s biggest charitable effort concerned hurricane relief. The foundation raised $1.4 million during and after the 2024 hurricane season including from state contractors Simply Health Plans and Centene Corp., the same company that was at the heart of the $10 million Medicaid settlement controversy, and Indelible Solutions, another state vendor and the company owned by Hay, the foundation’s president.
The Hope Florida foundation spent just a portion of that money on hurricane relief. That includes the payments in February ranging from $1,680 to $23,000 to six families, who DCF emails suggest are all foster families. The foundation also sent checks during that same time period to a Polk County air conditioning contractor, two cabinet makers in the Tampa Bay area and a furniture store in Levy County. It even made a payment of $984 to Clearwater Gas System.
Those payments, which amount to nearly $90,000, are the only ones that appear to have gone directly to hurricane expenses. There was another $100,000 given to the Florida Emergency Management Assistance Inc., the nonprofit arm of the state’s Division of Emergency Management.
Keith Gold, president of Gold Communications, offered the Sentinel some insights into the spending, speaking for the Children’s Network of Hillsborough County, an umbrella organization for that region.
After the hurricanes hit last fall, Gold said, state and local child care agencies reached out to foster families to make sure the children in their care were safe and ask if they needed immediate assistance.
“Those families known at the time to have had significant damage to their homes were encouraged to provide their receipts and/or estimates for repair work for DCF to consider,” Gold said. “Fortunately, most of the foster families in the circuit suffered little or no damage.”
But some did, and the Hope Florida Foundation stepped in to cover some costs. The spreadsheet provided to the Sentinel listed six families that got foundation help, though no first names, addresses or details about what damage they suffered.
A woman in Lutz, a small community north of Tampa, said her family received $1,680 “for out of pocket expenses” following the storms. The Sentinel is withholding her name since she identified herself as a foster parent.
The woman said she submitted her expenses through her supervisor, who sits on the board of directors of Camelot Community Care, which provides foster care and mental health services in Hillsborough.
She also received help from Michelle Hernandez of Expert Handyman Services in Tampa, who said she got a call from DCF that the family needed immediate repair work on their home or the state would have to remove the five foster children in their care, Hernandez said.
Contacted on a Friday in October, Hernandez promised to get the repairs done by that Monday. She removed a tree from the roof, deep cleaned the house and made minor repairs, she said.
Hernandez was asked to provide a bid for all the work she did and still had to do, and a month or two later a woman texted her to say she had a check for her, Hernandez said. She also got an email from DCF Communications Director Lorelli Vargas on April 30 that said: “Hello, it was a pleasure speaking to you. Please find receipt paid in full for Garcia Misc Jobs. Thank you so much for assisting this family.”
Hernandez said she was surprised to get a $6,120 check from the Hope Florida Foundation because she thought she was providing the work for free.
“I have no clue how this happened,” Hernandez said.